The invention relates to a mounting board with means for conducting and distributing fluid under pressure to components on it.
Such mounting boards are employed as parts of hydraulic or pneumatic circuits where they serve to produce standardized terminal connections. More especially they are connected with sources of fluid under pressure and with loads requiring such fluid. They may be fitted with components such as valves. The mounting boards may be joined together in rows in a modular fashion and then constitute large units with a large number of terminals. Such a large unit may more especially be a valve array with each mounting board carrying one valve for controlling one connection to a load.
The present invention is more particularly concerned with producing the mechanical link between the mounting boards which are fitted together in the form of a fluid distributing unit. In the prior art tie rods have been used which extend through holes in the mounting board and are tightened with the effect of screw joint for this purpose. This involves various disadvantages. The fitting of a screw connection is an elaborate assembly operation only possible with special tools which are not always available. The tie rods themselves are long and waste space and have to be individually cut to suit the size of the assembly so that a large stock of rods with different lengths has to be maintained. Once it has been assembled it is not readily possible to enlarge upon a unit, as for example in the form of a valve array, by adding further mounting boards. Lastly, it is hardly feasible to detach a single mounting board from a large array, if it is in the middle of the array, without releasing all other mounting boards in the group so that such systems are not flexible in application and modifications are complex and likely to cause leaks.